Nobama healthscare

Looks like Howard Dean, Kucinich, Dukakis, even Ed Schultz, will be furious that their golden boy is now calling their much-hyped "public-option" as just but one "sliver" of health reform. The Times story writes of Democrat Kent Conrad predicting "that Mr. Obama would have no choice but to drop the public option.

“The fact of the matter is, there are not the votes in the United States Senate for the public option,” Mr. Conrad said on “Fox News Sunday.” “There never have been. So to continue to chase that rabbit, I think, is just a wasted effort.”

The co-op, modeled after rural electric and agricultural cooperatives in Mr. Conrad’s home state, would offer insurance through a nonprofit, nongovernmental consumer entity run by its members. Mr. Axelrod said one downside of a co-op, from Mr. Obama’s point of view, was that it might be unable to “scale up in such a way that would create a robust” competitor to private insurers."

I wrote about this very aspect - of co-op type reforms as being the likely outcome of all this reform debate - back on July 5, 2009 ...

In the above post I also mentioned a very interesting and telling interview that single-payer- pushing radio host Ed Schultz had with Kent Conrad, which aired on July 3, 2009. In this interview, no matter what Conrad tried to calmly tell him, Schultz would not hear it. An obviously angered Schultz kept yammering over and over at Conrad about pushing through single-payer, about getting back at the insurance companies, about polls, about 'neo-nuts', about it being better to 'fight the fight and lose it'. Conrad tried to counter Schultz saying that we can't afford to just fight and risk failure, that that was not a wise option. Conrad reminded Schultz that 'legislation does not pass by a poll of the people, it passes by a vote on the floor of Congress', and that there weren't enough votes. Now, as we see in the Aug.17, 2009 Times article: Conrad's assessment of the situation was prescient and has remained unchanged; it's essentially what he tried to tell a frothing-at-the-mouth Schultz back in July.